Cooking for Geeks

I just listened to a great Science Friday show from back in September. It was a new book author interview, Jeff Potter's Cooking for Geeks. The book is about the science behind the cooking. Potter is a computer science type that interviewed well. It wasn't as if he was a typical geek that might be uncomfortable with people. He approached cooking the way a scientist would approach it, and found that few people had really studied it to understand many aspects of it.

One of the firt things he did was get an IR (infrared) thermometer. I've seen these in industrial settings and always assumed that they were horribly expensive. They often look like a little gun, you point it at what you want to measure and press a button and get a digital readout. Using this tool, Potter could actually learn what temperature things happen at. I remember him discussing carmelization or browning happening at 130 degrees, but I'm sure there are other things to know, like the boiling and melting point of major ingredients.

He said that he would take a recipe and remake it several times in a row, changing one variable each time and learning what the result were for each change. From this description, you can see that he was approaching cooking like it was pure scientific experimentation. I could really relate to this myself.

The most fun story that he told was about the way he discovered that the cleaning cycle for his oven would take it up to 900 degrees. He figured out how to disable the safety switch in the door so he could have it on and open the door. He learned that you can cook pizza in this was in about 45 seconds and it is delicious. The problem was that he shattered the glass in the oven door. He got on Craigslist and ordered a piece of special quartz material to replace his oven window. He said that this material was developed and used for the nosecones of rockets going into space. You can buy anything online, was his comment.

I bought the book, but I haven't read it or started using it yet. And still, I highly recommend it.